War & Peace Quote by Elihu Root

Root isn’t selling peace as a misty ideal; he’s pitching it as a behavioral technology. The line reads like a lawyerly brief for restraint: every war avoided is not only a saved catastrophe but a precedent. In Root’s framing, peace is path-dependent. Skip one conflict and you don’t just dodge casualties and costs; you strengthen the default setting a society reaches for when tensions rise again.

The subtext is quietly corrective to the romantic mythology of war that hovered over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Root, a central architect of modern American statecraft (and later a Nobel Peace Prize recipient), watched empires and rising powers treat war as a proving ground for national character. His counter-argument is shrewdly procedural: character is built less by heroic exception than by repeated choice. “Habit” is the key word, borrowed from the language of institutions and law rather than sermons. It implies that peace isn’t secured by good intentions but by routines: arbitration, diplomacy, treaty frameworks, professionalized foreign policy, and the slow normalization of nonviolent dispute resolution.

“Community habits long continued become standards of conduct” is where Root reveals his real target: legitimacy. Standards are what make actions feel natural, even inevitable. If war is repeatedly treated as an acceptable instrument, it graduates into convention. If peace is repeatedly chosen, it gains the same cultural authority. Root’s intent is to shift the conversation from whether peace is noble to whether it can become normal - and to warn that societies are always practicing for their next crisis, whether they mean to or not.